One year in perspective!

Let us take a quick look at some of the issues covered in this column during the last one year and see what is the situation today.

In the very first article I told you about the many entrepreneurs and executives who were very sure that they didn’t need a web site! The reasons varied from person to person, but generally the logic (or rather, the absence of logic) behind this was the same. “We don’t sell anything in the international markets, so what’s the point in spending money on a web site?”

The situation has turned a full circle and come back to where it was via a different route! The year saw the rise and rise of the dotcom hype and with that came many entrepreneurs and executives who wanted a web site immediately. “How soon can you do it?” – they asked. “Three months will be too late, we have other designers who can do it in three weeks!” and they went ahead full steam with their quick fix web sites.

At the end of the year, there is sudden panic setting in. “The dotcom bubble is going to burst any time!” — industry pundits are saying now. But if you don’t go up with the hype and you don’t go down with the panic, there is still a great untapped potential on the Internet for your business.

Disappearing domain names

Availability of good domain names for web sites is diminishing very fast. Act early to try and get the desired name for your website. I had alerted you in one of the later articles. The situation is now worse. Every one is registering domain names; some of them are registering them by the dozen. One Indian businessman has registered as many as 1300 domain names and he says none of them are for sale! I have read this in the newspapers, so don’t ask me for a proof. I can’t afford to crosscheck all these 1300 domain names in the Network Solutions Whois records.

Another article had discussed how the search engines on the Internet are not standardized and don’t work according to a fixed set of rules. They all work according to their own rules and logic. The worst part of it is that the rules and logic keep changing every day. So, you can’t afford to tailor your web site for one particular search engine to get top ranking on their index.

Every other search engine will apply different rules to rank

Every other search engine will apply different rules to rank your site in their index. The situation is now really getting out of hand with so many web sites being launched and being listed on the search engines. You can no longer depend only on your search engine placement. Promoting your web site through other channels is becoming more and more important. Newspapers and magazines who were worried about losing advertising revenues due to the Internet are now getting crores of rupees – more from the advertising campaigns of new portals being launched everyday.

30-second rule

In one of the articles I had given you "The 30 seconds rule!" to check out how fast your web site loads. Considering the low speeds of Internet connections I had given you a grace period of another 10 seconds to check if the home page loaded completely on the browser screen. Today if I give you a grace period of another 40 seconds, your homepage may still not be there on the screen!

If you track the loading time of your homepage through a 24 hours period – you will get some interesting results. The test may show you that your homepage takes 40 seconds to four minutes to load at various times of the day. That is why finally I had to suggest the possibility of giving a "Text only" option on your web site.

Do you remember the real life story of a web site owner who wanted to get into e-commerce without spending much on e-commerce enabling his web site, without doing the necessary homework and totally ignorant about the risk he was taking? I still find people like him, thinking of getting into e-commerce without spending much money. Even a large private sector bank got its site hacked due to careless approach to security needs. If you are thinking of B2B or B2C like every other person in business, be prepared to do your homework on the security issues.

I have been frequently bringing up the issue of the bandwidth our ISPs provide. The situation is worsening every day. Over the period of last one year, the average speed I get from my Internet connection has reduced to almost 20 percent of what it was. Even though the ISP charges have reduced to almost half over the one-year period, I am effectively paying much more for the same volume of work I do on the Net today.

I have an ordinary dial-up connection, but a client who has an ISDN connection tells me that his story is not much different. The only hope, as I said in the beginning, is at the end of the bottleneck! Like God said at the beginning of this world – "Let there be Light!" and there was light, I hope the God once again says – "Let there be Bandwidth!" and there will be a lot of bandwidth for the beginning of a New World.

Want to try your luck? Send an e-mail to God@Heavens.org

Don’t be surprised when you find out that the domain name heavens.org has also been taken up by some humans!

Ashok Dongre is an advertising and marketing professional, specializing in website design.